Plus Ca Change Art of France

The Valley of the Dordogne seems like a good place for an Englishman

to think about France.

A country I've loved since I first came here as a teenager

to learn the language.

This is the very heart of la France profonde...

..and how profoundly peaceful it seems, with its fat rivers,

stately chateaux, neat vineyards.

On a sunny day it's easy to believe that this place, this nation,

has been and always will be an earthly paradise.

But elsewhere, things are not so peaceful.

Beneath the placid surface lies a republic in the throes of violent change.

Dogged by economic stagnation and unemployment.

Assailed by terrorism.

Failing the brave promise of liberty, equality,

fraternity for all its citizens.

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In the suburb of St Denis, on the northern outskirts of Paris,

you can see the truly varied faces of this modern nation.

But it's a reality many in France refused to accept.

There are people who say that this place doesn't even deserve to be

considered as part of France.

But of course they're wrong.

The truth is that France has never been just one thing.

Proof of that lies at the heart of this ancient marketplace,

in a building that's nothing less than the French equivalent of

Westminster Abbey.

The Basilica of St Denis.

Final resting place of every French king and queen, bar three,

stretching back over 1500 years.

Don't be fooled by the tranquillity of this Gothic crypt into thinking

that the history laid out here is one of serene continuity,

or some ideal of pure Frenchness.

Just like the market traders outside,

these long dead rulers were a mixed bunch.

Flemish, German, Italian, even English lie alongside the French.

Like every great country, France has always been a mongrel nation...

..and also a nation shaped by violence.

There's no better example of than poor Marie Antoinette.

Born in Austria, she became queen to Louis XVI,

then lost her head to the French Revolution.

Her remains, like his, were flung into an unmarked grave,

only to be exhumed and given the dignity of royal burial some

30 years later.

This monument by the sculptor, Edme Gaulle, marks the spot,

its sugar-coated surface applied to an end that was very bitter indeed.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, as they say here.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

And as the story of Gaulle's monument proves,

French history has certainly been subject to violent change.

And this, too, is the story of the art of France.

A struggle between revolution and tradition, freedom and constraint,

rulers and a people who didn't always want to be ruled.

And out of that tension between the change and the meme chose would be

born some of the greatest art the world has ever seen.

Echoes of revolution linger in the Basilica of St Denis.

And I don't mean the one that did for Marie Antoinette.

Almost 1000 years ago, another revolution took place here.

The first revolution in French art.

The invention of Gothic architecture.

CHOIR SINGS

The Gothic style transformed the churches and cathedrals of the

Western world and it all began here.

St Denis was the world's very first Gothic cathedral.

It was the brainchild of a man called Abbe Suger,

who also wrote about it, describing the process by which the

original church was transformed into this magnificent cathedral.

Beginning in the year 1137, St Denis, already by then 500 years old,

suddenly emerged from its Romanesque chrysalis.

Spurred on by the visionary and ambitious Suger,

St Denis' master masons borrowed from Islamic architecture,

boldly synthesising Eastern ideas about structure, volume and form,

with native innovations from Normandy and Burgundy.

So, yes, Gothic was French, but spoken, you might say,

with an Arab accent.

And with what spectacular results.

Round arches were replaced by pointed ribbed arches that sprang

from clustered columns, drawing the eye up to vaulted ceilings high above.

Massive walls, dark and defensive,

were opened up to let the sacred light come flooding in.

Suger also offered a beautiful justification for the whole project.

A response to those who said he'd spent too much money.

"The dull mind rises to truth through material things."

The transformation of St Denis proved to be enormously influential.

Within the space of a generation, the French style, as it was called,

was sprouting up everywhere, in ever more complex, ambitious forms.

And, for me, the most sublime expression of the Gothic spirit,

ascending upwards perhaps to truth, certainly to beauty,

is a jewel-like building in the heart of Paris.

The Sainte-Chapelle.

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What a magical, beguiling space this is.

It's the function of architecture in here to abolish itself,

to efface itself, so you're unaware of structure.

You experience the entire space in terms of light and colour.

It's almost like a gigantic light box.

In fact, it makes more sense to think of this place as a box

than to think of it as a building because it was actually designed to

house one particular thing.

The most precious thing in the entire world.

In 1238, King Louis IX of France, Saint Louis as he became known,

acquired, at huge expense, nothing less than the crown of thorns.

The holiest relic in all of Christendom.

The Sainte-Chapelle was built in flamboyant Gothic style

to house the precious relic.

A decade later, in 1248, dressed as a penitent, barefoot,

Louis himself carried the crown of thorns into the Sainte-Chapelle,

and placed it on the altar.

Now, for Louis it was a gesture of huge significance.

Spiritual and also political.

Because, by acquiring the most holy object in the universe,

he had, by implication, by placing it here in Paris, here in France,

he had made France the very centre of the world.

But what was daily life like in France in the Middle Ages?

And why did the Gothic mind yearn to rise above the world of material things?

In the Chateau of Chantilly, 30 miles north of Paris,

is a medieval treasure of another kind,

and it suggests some answers to those questions.

The Tres Riches Heures is a prayer book,

created in the early 15th century by Flemish artists,

the Limbourg brothers, for a great French nobleman, the Duc de Berry.

It begins with a celebrated sequence showing the months of the

year, which, even in facsimile,

reveal a breathtaking mastery of the medieval illuminator's art.

One of the distinguishing features of these illustrations of the months

is the sense that they gave one of a perfectly ordered world.

Labour is depicted as a graceful, easeful, almost effortless activity.

The peasants might be barefoot but they seem almost to dance as they

scythe, as they rake, and as they gather the hay into these...

..very neat little mounds.

Here we are in September.

It's one of my favourites.

In the very middle of the scene, what do we see?

This figure actually bares his arse inadvertently while picking grapes.

And I think it's rather like some of the grotesques that you find in

Gothic cathedrals. A little detail that's meant to raise a smile.

The months end with this really extraordinary image of December.

It's a boar hunt.

It's a scene of quite considerable savagery.

This pack of dogs tearing at the flesh of the boar.

The dog handler can't actually tear the animal off the beast.

I think it's an image that reminds us that throughout this period

that death was, for most people, the most overwhelming reality of all.

In this period, substantial chunks of what we now think of as France

were claimed by others.

The Burgundians, the Flemish and the Goddams, the foul-mouthed English,

who fought a hundred-year war to stake their claim.

And riding alongside war were death's other trusty allies,

Pestilence and Famine.

And so, while death triumphed, France remained a work in progress,

politically fractured, culturally uncertain.

One of the great French myths, repeated through the centuries,

is the idea that France has somehow always been at the very centre of

human civilisation.

But when it comes to art, that's really not quite true,

because between 1450 and the beginnings of the 17th century,

France produced not one single painter of international fame.

In fact, during the Renaissance, if the French were famous for anything,

it was for destroying art rather than creating it.

In the 1490s, the troops of Louis XII invaded Milan and with

their bows and arrows, shot to pieces Leonardo da Vinci's great

model for what was to have been the largest equestrian sculpture in the world.

It's not quite true to say the French made no contribution to

Renaissance art and architecture.

This rare but beautifully elegant courtyard,

with its bas-relief sculptures by John Goujon is proof of that.

But its very rarity does tell a story.

So, too, the fact that Francois premier, Francis I,

the French king who did more than any other to bring the Renaissance

to France, did so by importing Italian artists,

notably Leonardo himself.

Perhaps a form of consolation for having destroyed that great statue.

The fact remains, that during the Renaissance,

France was not the leader, it was the follower.

But not every Renaissance man in France was labelled,

"Made in Italy".

-So have you got the keys?

-Yes.

One of the greatest thinkers and writers of the era,

indeed of all time, was born and lived for most of his life in a

remote chateau in south-west France.

He developed new ways of thinking and seeing that would transform the

literature and art, not just of France, but of the Western world.

His name was Michel de Montaigne,

and he was born at the chateau of Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne in 1533.

A true child of the Renaissance,

he was brought up to speak Latin as his mother tongue.

Trained in the law and active in the court rooms and Parliament of

Bordeaux, he retired at 38, weary, he tells us,

of the court and public duties.

He retreated here, to a simple tower on his family estate,

where he surrounded himself with the works of his beloved classical authors.

Wow! Merci.

Thank you.

I've read about this sky with its stars.

Montaigne's bedroom was just above here and he used to joke,

I'm one of the few people in the world who actually sleeps above the sky!

France at the time was racked by religious wars with thousands of

Protestants massacred by Catholic mobs in Paris and elsewhere on

Saint Bartholomew's day.

Montaigne, himself a Catholic,

practised a philosophy of tolerance and moderation.

From his tower, he honoured the open mind and the right of every

individual to challenge man-made authority.

In a nutshell, he was France's first great freethinker.

The French intellectual tradition is often all about order, rules,

the system. But Montaigne, who's at the start of it all, well,

he's the great exception to the rule.

He's all about disorder, irregularity.

You could even compare his thought to this uneven,

winding stone staircase.

He himself said,

"I'm never quite sure where my thoughts are going to take me.

"All I can do is follow them."

BIRDS CAW

This feels a bit like a bird's nest up here.

And the ceiling's wonderful.

Montaigne's study is a miraculous survival from a vanished world,

its beams inscribed with his favourite sayings

from the Bible but, above all, from the stoic writers of the classical age.

Homo sum, humani a me nihil alienum puto.

I am a man and nothing human is alien to me.

And it was from these sources that he would create a new kind of deeply

personal writing, the essay, a joyful exploration of the self.

Montaigne's fame rests on his essays.

There are about 100 of them and, depending on the edition,

they fill something like ten volumes with his wonderfully rambling

diverse thoughts.

He writes about friendship, he writes about loyalty,

he writes an essay on thumbs, he writes about Siamese twins.

But what runs throughout all of them, I think,

is a tremendous levelling ambition.

He wants us to recognise our common humanity but he also wants us to

recognise how frail our humanity is.

Whatever these futilities of mine may be, I have no intention of

hiding them any more than I would a bald and grizzled

portrait of myself.

These are my humours, my opinions, things which I believe,

not things to be believed.

My aim is to reveal myself, which may well be different tomorrow.

He proposed, I think, a new sense of identity for his period...

..a profoundly uncertain sense of self.

"Que sais-je?" he said.

What do I know?

It's a concept of self that has a huge influence on all of European

civilisation. Shakespeare almost certainly read Montaigne.

Hard to imagine Hamlet without Montaigne.

Hard to imagine Rembrandt's self portraits in which he appears happy,

glad, sad, old, young, bold, timid.

Hard to imagine all that without Montaigne.

But in France...

..the response to him, I think, above all, is one of profound unease.

It's as if Montaigne, with his que sais-je? What do I know?

Lays down a huge challenge that...

..those who rule France and those who would rule France,

spend much of the next three centuries attempting to answer.

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Montaigne brandished his philosopher's sense of uncertainty

with exuberance and wit, but he was followed by a pessimistic

and melancholic generation for whom doubt was no laughing matter

but a state of mind made permanent by the Wars of religion and dynastic

rivalry that raged across France and Europe.

The 30 Years War was documented by Jacques Callot in a searing

portfolio of engravings entitled The Miseries And Misfortunes Of War,

nearly three centuries before Goya and just as harrowing.

Strange fruit dangled from the lynching tree,

a snapshot vision of a single atrocity which Callot and his

audience knew was just part of a far greater human catastrophe.

Some 8 million dead by war's end, a quarter of Europe's total population.

At times like these, stoicism and endurance seemed the only answer,

exemplified in Louis Le Nain's painting of a peasant family.

They're surrounded by shadows so deep it looks like darkness made visible.

And what's in that darkness?

Perhaps the memories of all those lost to war.

But the master painter of these dark times was surely this man, Nicolas Poussin.

Born to a family of impoverished nobility,

he spent nearly all of his career away from France in Rome.

He studied the Renaissance masters.

He read the same classical authors that had beguiled Montaigne.

And he struggled to make sense in pictures rather than words of a

disordered world.

Poussin was the first French painter fully to take

possession of the language of the Italian Renaissance.

In standing here in this room, surrounded by his works,

I feel almost as if I am inside Poussin's brain.

And here, you can feel what he has made of the Renaissance,

how he's made that language almost like a language of dream so that he

can use it to reflect on what's getting under his skin.

He's thinking about Diogenes, the Stoics,

the total renunciation of worldly possessions, a man who's decided

that even a simple drinking bowl is too much to own.

He's thinking about violence, the Romans abducting the Sabine women,

about how every great civilisation is founded on a crime.

I think it was Poussin's achievement, if you like,

to turn painting into a form of essay, like the essays of Montaigne,

a way of reflecting on the nature and meaning of life.

And that's why I've chosen this picture...

..as perhaps the ultimate expression of that impulse.

This is Arcadia.

A group of shepherds and a young lady in classical costume,

almost a living statue, have gathered in this earthly paradise

around a tomb on which it is inscribed the phrase,

Et in Arcadia ego.

I, too, am in Paradise.

I, meaning death.

This shepherd notes the inscription...

..but he, the figure that punctuates the composition and gives it its

emotional weight, he is plunged into deep, deep sadness.

"Que sais-je?" Montaigne had asked. What do I know?

And I think it's as if Poussin is asking himself the same question,

and he says to himself, "Well, I only know one thing,

"which is that we're all going to die."

Death, wars, division.

Thunderclouds gathering over France.

But one man believed that he could dispel the clouds,

banish doubt and uncertainty,

bend history to his will and make France the centre of the world.

Not symbolically, as Louis IX had done at Sainte-Chapelle,

but in actual fact.

His name, Louis XIV.

The Sun King.

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And this is where he lived, in a palace fit for a Sun King,

the largest palace ever created by a European monarch.

Versailles.

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Versailles is the grandest grande projet ever conceived by the

French state, whether Royal or Republican.

A former hunting lodge, its transformation into this powerhouse

of a Palace began in 1661 when the 23-year-old Louis,

after years of dutiful submission to his councillors and advisers,

suddenly and unexpectedly dismissed the lot of them and assumed direct

personal command of France.

Now, Louis may never have said the words most famously attributed to him,

L'etat c'est moi, I am the state,

but then again, he didn't really need to.

Versailles said them for him.

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There's something almost medieval about Versailles and its

determination to express absolute truth through bricks and mortar.

But, of course, there's a huge difference between this palace and

the great cathedrals of the Gothic past.

They existed to include everyone, to include the masses.

But Louis XIV had contempt for the common people.

It was even forbidden for an ordinary person, a servant,

to die at Versailles.

They had to be taken elsewhere to expire otherwise they might pollute

the perfection of this royal realm.

In 1682, Louis moved his court to Versailles and 2,000 aristocrats

anxiously followed, knowing that opportunity and security depended on

being constantly under the eye of the King.

His courtiers were trapped like birds in a gilded cage.

Even in the celebrated palace gardens,

designed for Louis by Andre Le Notre,

the themes of surveillance and control were hard to miss.

The endless vistas radiating out from the palace were, in effect,

sight lines for the eye of the King.

Like God, Louis saw everything.

Not everyone was impressed by Versailles.

In 1698, an English diplomat called Matthew Prior came here

and clearly hated the place.

"The King's house at Versailles," he wrote,

"is the foolishest in the world.

"He's strutting in every panel,

"galloping over one's head in every ceiling and, if he turns to spit,

"he must see himself or his vice regent, the son."

But it won't quite do to dismiss all this as folly and tyrannical vanity.

The truth is that the great project of Versailles,

which was itself part of the even greater project of rebuilding France

itself, was always grounded in cool,

hard logic and a firm grasp of political and economic realities.

As the Galerie des Glaces, or hall of mirrors at Versailles shows,

there's always more going on than meets the eye in the

Palace of the Sun King.

When this room was begun in 1668, mirrored glass was one of the most

expensive man-made commodities in the world and could only be bought

in Venice, which jealously guarded the secrets of its making.

Louis and his finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, broke that monopoly.

They lured a group of Venetian mirror makers to France to establish

a new state financed venture, the Manufacture Royale Des Glaces.

Venetian assassins were dispatched to kill the defectors but to no avail.

Louis got his room of many reflections and France acquired a

new lucrative state owned enterprise.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the canniest of them all?

Swathed in silk and lace and acres of fleur de lis ermine,

wearing shimmering hose tights and silver buckled shoes with their talon rouge,

red heels reserved exclusively for the aristocracy.

This is Louis XIV as realised by his court portraitist,

Hyacinthe Rigaud.

It's a painting that proclaims not merely Louis's magnificence but the

sheer scale of his trade policies because every inch of these swirling,

sumptuous fabrics was produced by one or other of the myriad new state

enterprises Louis and his minister, Colbert, had set up.

Protectionism, subsidies, loans, tax breaks,

Colbert used them all to turn France into the world's leading producer of

luxury goods.

"Fashions were to France," he boasted, "what the mines of Peru were to Spain."

So look again at Rigaud's portrait.

A strutting peacock?

Look into those eyes.

This is a man in perfect control of himself and his world,

a model king advertising brand France.

Artists were an essential part of Louis' system.

The Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, established in 1648,

controlled commissions, policed production and enforced standards by

the rigorous training of all would-be artists.

This process, in which students are permitted to draw from the life,

this was the final phase of an artist's education.

Before this, the artist would spend perhaps a year drawing from drawings,

then a year drawing from plaster casts and, only finally,

only as the artist approached mastery,

would they be allowed to draw the naked human form.

All forms of creative activity was subject to rules during the reign of

Louis XIV. Poets had to obey the rules of decorum.

Playwrights had to obey the unities of time, place and action.

But no-one had more rules to obey than the painter,

who truly was the prisoner of a system.

One of the principal designers of that system was Charles Le Brun,

director of the academy, half artist, half bureaucrat.

As artist, he designed Versailles' Hall of Mirrors.

As bureaucrat, he set the standards at the academy,

enforcing a strict hierarchy of genres, which placed his speciality,

history painting, at the top.

And he drilled into aspiring artists and colleagues alike,

that when it came to art, the system ruled.

But for Le Brun, the body was just the beginning.

If you wanted to be able to create pictures that were absolutely,

unambiguously clear in their statement of devotion to the ideals

of king and state, you had to study the human face.

And for Le Brun...

..the secret was all in the eyebrows.

Le Brun's theory, briefly stated, had to do with the pineal gland,

which he believed, mistakenly, was placed directly between the eyes,

as the focal point of all human emotions.

The eyebrows, being closest to the gland, acted as a kind of seismograph.

Their position indicating the degree and the type of emotion being felt.

From wide-eyed admiration, to bug-eyed terror.

The task of the artist was to master this repertoire of expressions.

Thereby, creating works whose meaning could be read as easily as

a piece of text.

Here's a demonstration.

Le Brun's gigantic picture of the family of the defeated Persian King

Darius, prostrating themselves before the victorious Alexander the Great.

For Alexander, read of course, Louis.

And for the family of Darius, read the nation of France itself.

From high to low, beholding the great conqueror, their leader,

with a series of officially prescribed, precisely rendered expressions.

Attention...

..admiration with astonishment...

..veneration.

Because of their scale and intricacy,

pictures like this became known as "grandes machines", great machines.

But as Nicolas Milovanovic, Louvre curator and Le Brun expert explains,

they're actually the result of a collaboration between Le Brun the

painter, and Louis himself, the King.

At that time, in the '60s,

Louis XIV was fascinated by the figure of Alexander.

Louis XIV wanted to be a new Alexander, and Le Brun understood that.

So, that's the reason for...

How did Le Brun go about inventing this idea of a painting?

Because they're vast.

You have to be in front of them to realise they are, you know,

12 metres width, four metres high.

So, you have to enter in the painting.

You really are part of the battle, and that was the aim of Le Brun,

to create a kind of, you know, cinema for us.

That must have been a huge thrill, if one's trying to understand,

from Louis XIV's perspective.

Louis must have been bowled over by it.

The moment when Le Brun was painting the first composition of the series,

that's the family of Darius in front of Alexander,

Louis XIV was coming to discuss it with Le Brun,

and tell him what he will paint for tomorrow.

So in a sense, Louis XIV is almost the director of the movie?

-Yeah, yeah.

-And Le Brun's the cinematographer.

That's very right, what you say.

The king was, you know, in the first place, the author, the subject,

but also the author of the painting.

Louis' systems, from art to manufacturing,

transformed France into a European superpower.

It had a population of 20 million, compared to England's eight.

Government revenues were five times as large.

It had a navy and an army that were the strongest in Europe.

And it used them to project French power along its borders, and beyond.

If Louis had an Achilles heel, it was his fondness for conquest.

But even in matters of war, he planned everything meticulously.

As you can see, in what may be the single most remarkable survival of

his rule, a collection of extraordinary but largely forgotten objects,

now to be found in the basement of the Musee des Beaux Arts in Lille.

They were all made for the king, these great tables.

Each one is a town, a representation of a town, that he had fortified.

This is Ypres, this is Tournai.

There were originally 144 of these objects.

They occupied 8,000 square metres of the Louvre,

nearly a mile to walk past all of them.

And what they represented, I think, for Louis,

was a tangible demonstration of the extent to which he had expanded and

secured France's borders.

They also served a very practical purpose.

Because, when he came here, with his generals or his advisers,

he could plan strategy.

He could literally feel with his hand, the lie of the land.

And he could enjoy, as no-one else in the world could do,

a bird's eye view of these strategically important cities.

I think the "plans-reliefs", as they are called, it's extraordinary,

goodness knows how many man-hours went into their creation.

I think what they represent is a making good of the promise that

Versailles, as it were, holds out.

That, yes, the king's eye stretches to the very end of the realm.

These plans-reliefs, they prove that that promise wasn't empty.

It was true.

Louis did see everything.

Omniscient, and also immortal, or so it must have seemed.

For, while death carried off wives, mistresses, ministers, sons,

even grandsons, Louis lived on, indestructible as his bronze likeness.

But finally, in 1715, death caught up with him,

after more than 70 years on the throne.

He left a France politically powerful,

but virtually bankrupted by his appetite for war.

A society in which the ultra rich scorned the overtaxed poor,

whose stoicism, unlike Le Nain's peasant family,

couldn't be taken for granted.

So, what next?

In a fashionable Parisian picture shop,

the dead king's likeness is buried in the straw of a packing crate.

While on the other side,

an art lover genuflects before a very different style of painting.

The message, from Jean-Antoine Watteau, couldn't be clearer.

The times, they are a-changing.

Watteau's one of the most mysterious of French painters, and this picture,

Pierrot, is perhaps his most enigmatic masterpiece of all.

What does it show us?

The figure of a clown, dressed in white,

is stranded in a piece of landscape that might almost be a stage set.

But, no play is taking place.

An expression of ineffable pathos on his face,

there's something more than slightly absurd about him.

You'd have a hard job matching this enigmatic expression to anything in

Le Brun's neat little system.

Watteau signals a return to Montaigne's elusive sense of humanity,

as something you can't just put in a box.

So, what does the picture mean?

Nobody knows for sure, and I can't pretend to say.

But I do think it's significant that it was painted just three years

after the death of Louis XIV.

It's as if the great director of life in all of France,

the great dictator, the great puppet master, well, he's gone.

And now, it's as if all of France is in his position.

They don't know what to do next.

Watteau did have one suggestion to make.

Escape.

The Embarkation to the Island of Cythera was his invitation to an

aristocracy exhausted by the Alexander the Greatism of Louis XIV.

A private world of gallantry, flirtation, passion.

"Make love," says Watteau, "not war."

And so, a new artistic style appeared,

born on the wings of plump, playful cherubs.

Rococo.

One of the principal inventors of rococo style in painting was the

great Francois Boucher.

And this relatively modest picture,

which shows Diana accompanied by her attendants after the hunt, takes us,

I think, to the heart of that style.

The scale itself is significant.

This is a picture intended for domestic contemplation.

It's not meant to inspire you with political or moral virtue.

It's meant to please you.

And yet, it's still within the tradition of French painting,

as it had been established by Le Brun back in the great days of Louis XIV.

Boucher had been to Le Brun's French Academy.

Like Poussin, he had studied in Rome.

And, like those artists, he's working with the grand, allegorical,

mythological tradition of French painting.

But what he's emptied it of is any sense of political seriousness or

moral intent. This is, if you like,

the perfect picture for an age dedicated to luxury,

libertinage and love.

Boucher's Diana was painted in 1745,

the same year that another goddess of love made a conquest.

Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, installed as Louis XV's maitresse-en-titre,

or official mistress.

It was a role for which she'd been groomed from the age of nine,

and as Madame de Pompadour, she played it with style,

emerging as an influential patron of the arts,

Boucher was a particular favourite,

and shaping the taste of the rococo world.

And what taste it was.

As if all the pomp and circumstance of the great Palace of Versailles

had been distilled down into the sort of delicious plaything you

could just slip into your pocket.

Now, I've kindly been allowed to open this display case,

which is a rather rare and wonderful opportunity to

get close to all the knick-knackery,

the personal possessions of the gilded rich of the Ancien Regime.

One of my favourite objects of all is this tiny little gun,

decorated in enamel and cloisonne, which was designed...

..to fire a little jet of perfume,

perhaps into the bodice of an aristocratic lady.

You can almost smell the decadence.

And talking of liaisons dangereuses, look what we've got here.

It's an etude du message,

the 18th century precursor, if you like, of the text.

You'd roll up your message, put it in a cylinder, hand it to your footman,

and he would take it to the object of your affections.

It is, in effect, a kind of machine for arranging a liaison dangereux.

It's a wonderful display,

but you can see why there were those in France who thought that this was

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The most vocal critic of French high society at the time was the writer

Jean-Jacques Rousseau,

who railed against what he saw as the over sophistication,

the attachment to things of the French leisured classes.

Rousseau preferred nature to cities.

He made a cult of the child.

Every adult, he argued, was a once-innocent child who'd been

corrupted by his education and by false principles of belief.

He even went so far as to argue that civilisation itself was a retrograde force.

The more mankind moved away from their original, good,

primitive state,

the more they were drawn into temptation and into decadence.

At the centre of his thought,

Rousseau placed the figure of the noble savage.

But that begged a question,

who was truly noble, and who was truly savage?

And, who was to tell the difference?

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For critics of the status quo,

savage, noble or somewhere in between,

this was their secret weapon.

The multi-volume Encyclopedie, the Encyclopaedia,

published over a 20-year period between 1752 and 1772,

in spite of fierce opposition from censors, critics and the church.

Bruno Blasselle, director of the Arsenal Library in Paris,

is showing me a precious first edition.

Contributors to the Encyclopaedia included Rousseau, Voltaire,

and editor in chief, Denis Diderot.

Contentious, sometimes cantankerous voices, they were united in one thing.

Antagonism towards established authority.

This was the moment when Michel de Montaigne's

big ideas came home to roost.

But now, it wasn't just one solitary freethinker in his birds nest study.

It was a whole flock of them.

So, the three essential faculties of the civilised man necessary for the

advancement of human knowledge are...

Memory, reason and imagination.

Along with the mini essays of the written text came illustrations.

More than 4,000 in all.

The French Enlightenment's, Tres Riches.

This extraordinary image.

Goodness me.

They're so beautiful. Beautiful.

After 20 years of what he called untiring labour on the Encyclopaedia,

Diderot was ready for a change.

He took the essay, Montaigne's invention, into new territory.

My territory.

Art criticism.

Here you are. Bonjour, Monsieur Diderot.

This is one of my favourite paintings in the Louvre.

It's by Louis-Michel van Loo,

an otherwise undistinguished portrait painter.

But here, he has risen to heights far above his normal level.

I think stimulated by the personality of Denis Diderot.

Here he is, wonderfully informal.

His shirt's unbuttoned at the collar.

He's at his writing desk, in full flow.

The pen, you can almost hear it scratching away at the paper.

He's famous, world-famous, as the driving force behind the Encyclopaedia.

But as far as he was concerned,

his greatest achievement was his art criticism.

It was during the reign of Louis XV that art in France finally found a

general public.

The Academy had been exhibiting the work of its members since 1667,

but in 1737, the doors of the Salon held annually at the Louvre were

thrown open, and the crowds poured in.

Diderot was among them, reviewing the show for a philosophical and

cultural newsletter,

in which he used art as a stick with which to beat the establishment.

Daring to think the unthinkable, to question the very nature of society.

In the course of writing these reviews,

he turned art criticism very subtly into a form of social criticism.

The state of art, he equated with the state of France.

So, for example, when he writes about his bete noire Boucher,

with his unbridled eroticism, the vast expanses of powdered flesh,

so lewdly displayed on his canvases, Diderot is in effect criticising,

lashing out at the decadence of the entire Ancien Regime.

Who does he hold up, by contrast, with Boucher?

Who's the hero, if Boucher's the villain?

Well, surprisingly enough, and totally at variance with the

established academic hierarchy of genres,

which placed history painting at the top and still life at the bottom,

Diderot chose as his hero a painter of eggs, glasses of water,

copper pots, pans,

uneasily poised knives on table tops.

He chose a painter called Chardin.

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Chardin was a modest servant of the academy, he was its treasurer.

He was in charge of hanging the annual Salon,

all the while working in what were considered to be the lower reaches

of art, genre painting and still life.

Yet, for my money, he's one of the greatest, one of the most significant,

one of the most influential French painters who ever lived.

He established one of the great templates of French art,

the things that we see in a room and on the table, we paint these things,

and in so doing, we tell you what we think the world means.

Cezanne would follow Chardin in this respect.

All of Cubism, you could say,

with its table top concatenations of objects, derives from Chardin.

And he himself, I think,

knew very well that he wasn't just painting what things looked like.

He was trying to paint what the world meant to him.

This is his presentation piece.

The work he submitted so that he might be accepted into the academy.

It's called La Raie, The Ray, and it's his weirdest,

most disturbing painting.

Is it just a picture of still life objects?

I don't think so. Look at that great bloody central form,

the ray of the title.

A flatfish, grey, pink, red, blue for the liver and kidneys,

hung from a hook in a dungeon kitchen.

And to the left, look at that cat!

That cat, so alive with energy, it almost might be moving.

It seems blurred.

It's feral in its energies.

There wouldn't be another cat like it until

Manet painted Olympia, the prostitute,

the Parisian prostitute with her attendant cat.

When the great French novelist Marcel Proust saw The Ray,

he likened it to the nave of a polychromatic cathedral.

A comparison that takes us right back to Abbe Suger's resonant credo.

"A dull mind rises to truth through material things."

But to what truth does Chardin's paintings lead us?

For Diderot, Chardin's work stood with the idea that the simple life,

lived well and truthfully, is far more sacred than a rich life,

lived in decadence.

From that contrast, it is only a small step to more radical thoughts

about the instability of the whole system.

A profoundly sensitive and humane man, Chardin was no revolutionary.

But I can't help wondering if the unconscious mind that guided his

hand knew that the forces unleashed during his lifetime

might one day spin out of control.

Chardin said almost nothing about painting in his lifetime,

but one thing he did say, he reproved a younger painter,

who said, "I paint with colours."

And Chardin said, "You paint with colours? No, no.

"You use colours, but you paint with feeling."

What's the feeling here?

It's ominous.

There's death in the air.

There's decadence in the air.

And there's a sense of palpable threat.

Look at that knife on the table.

It's almost an invitation.

Take up that knife, do something.

You can change the world.

Which, of course, is precisely what happened next.